In the following essay, Callens assesses the underlying "mythic-symbolic dimension" of Sam Shepard's drama Buried Child, focusing on the complex and ambivalent water symbolism in the play.

In the following essay, Auerbach, an educator and critic, offers an interpretation of Buried Child, stressing the play's discouraging message of lost American promise, yet also noting a sense of hope at the conclusion of the drama.

In the essay below, Nash finds that Shepard utilizes elements of traditional folklore in Buried Child, creating ";a modern version of the central theme of Western mythology, the death and rebirth of the Corn King. ";

Buried Child was presented in New York City at the Theatre for the New City in November, 1978, and went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979. Clurman, a highly regarded director, educator, and author, and the drama critic for the Nation from 1953 to 1980, wrote the following review of Buried Child, praising the improvisational energy of the play and the ";quintessentially American"; nature of Shepard's work.

In this review Raidy expresses reservations about the obscurity of Buried Child, yet praises Shepard's imagination and declares the play an ";enormously stimulating"; experience.

[The plot of Buried Child] is a little too reminiscent of Pinter's The Homecoming. The funny, bitchy family infighting may owe something also to Edward Albee. The mother sequestered upstairs, who at play's end apostrophizes the sun, may be derived from Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman and the Osvald of Ghosts. But Buried Child has a strong visual life on stage, and the images do make a kind of sense. We get only adequate dialogue: sometimes wryly funny, sometimes menancing, often despairing...